Toddler Germs Will Level You
I've never been this sick, this often before
Apologies that this is not a list of interesting things I’ve done or eaten this week. That’s because I haven’t done or eaten anything interesting; I’ve been sick, again.
It’s not the fun kind of sick where I could “rest” and “take it easy” and just watch hours of TV or tuck into bed and read. Even though I have a supportive partner, “taking it easy” as a parent is a lot less relaxed than taking it easy ever was before I had a kid. I will never be the Sleepytime Tea bear.
I’m the kind of sick where every tube in my body located above my waist is suddenly coated in bright yellow snot that rattles when I breathe. Since Thursday, I’ve had the unnerving cough of a couple of boomers whose shag carpeting radiates 40 years of smoke accumulation. I cannot believe the sheer volume of snot that I am coughing and sneezing out. It doesn’t seem possible that there’s that much space inside my body. It’s like that scene in Mary Poppins when she keeps reaching into her carpetbag and pulling out more cartoonishly large objects.
I was always one of those smug assholes who never got sick. I chalked it up to pure luck and the fact that my immune system had some Olympian training under its belt; I was a filthy child who grew up in a rural area doing things like handling sick chickens and jumping through pond ice. Between graduating from college and the time I hit 30, I only got sick sick–as in from a germ and not from a hangover–once.
All that changed when I became a parent. I’d seen joking references to children being cute little petri dishes that provide for their families by collecting a wide assortment of germs and distributing them to their respective households. But I always thought that I’d somehow be the exception to this rule– after all, I Never Get Sick!
Nope. Toddler germs are not like the germs I was fighting off or avoiding in all my years of life before this one. They are strong. They insist upon themselves. They are, to the world of germs, the one kid who is destined to be on Broadway during the seventh grade vocal choir performance of “Seasons of Love,” performing the solo, and all of the parents look at each other with the grim acknowledgement that compared to this child, their kid is bad at singing.
Since Juniper has exited the newborn phase and entered into the more social toddler phase, I’ve been getting sick sick once a month, almost to the day. I know this because I remember the last time I got sick. It was exactly a month ago. I was hanging out with a friend who has small children, a rare and precious Mom Hang. In the hours leading up to meeting up with her, I felt my face growing dense, like a storm was gathering in my sinuses. My COVID test was negative. I warned her about how I was feeling but met up with her anyway in an outdoor cafe nearby, hoping that I could chase away illness simply by pretending that it wasn’t happening. There’s no way this wasn’t happening. My kid had been ill for the week prior, and sometimes in the middle of the night, she’d wake up and cry, and I’d pick her up and hold her, and she’d look right at me and cough directly into my mouth.
(Toddlers love to cough directly into their caregivers’ mouths. It’s a part of their germ-spreading charm. That’s another thing I didn’t know about parenting.)
Last month’s illness came on suddenly and harshly, but the worst of it lasted two days. This one’s hung around for four. I think I feel better, but it’s also possible that my baseline of feeling “good” has moved downward since I’ve caught this. I’m not only missing the things I expected to miss as a parent; I’ve had to miss things I expected I’d be able to attend. I missed the same friend’s kid’s third birthday party, which included a puppet show put on by professional puppeteers. I am the little girl from Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.”
Babies and toddlers get sick all the time. Their immune systems are learning how to navigate the microbial landscape, and every germ they encounter flummoxes their bodies, much like a person who has never been to Chipotle messes with the line when they try to figure out how to order on the fly. But I’m baffled by the array of germs my daughter has introduced me to. I’m humbled by their severity. I’ve tested for COVID every time I’ve gotten sick off her, convinced that the nasty coronavirus must be at fault, but I still have yet to catch COVID (or have COVID catch me). Whatever has felled me is always some wild unknown germ that my kid caught off another kid, probably at the playground, and the cure for it is to cough up more snot than I ever thought my body could possibly make, drink plenty of fluids, and “rest.”
At least I haven’t caught hand, foot, and mouth disease. Yet.